HOUSTON — The defining moment in Reid Ryan’s 41 years came long before he was named president of the Houston Astros in May.

The moment came before his first-born arrived in 2000 with cerebral palsy, leaving Nolan Ryan’s oldest grandson with problems using his right arm.

It came before a Ballpark in Arlington moment in 1996 when the ex-pitcher and would-be broadcaster decided he wanted to run a baseball team rather than call its games.

It came before the moment Reid rounded a corner at the Rangers spring training clubhouse in 1995 to find his locker cleaned out and his professional baseball playing days — the days he always dreamed about — over.

It came before Reid and family lived in Houston in the early 1980s and he and younger brother Reese schemed to sell from the Astrodome loading dock their father’s genuine big league glove, shoes and whatever else they could get their hands on to eager baseball fans.

The defining moment came when Reid Ryan was 7 years old. It all began May 9, 1979, a day burned into his mother’s memory. He was living the charmed life of a California Angels pitcher’s son in suburban Southern California.

Reid had been playing baseball with the neighborhood boys when a pack of passing bullies decided they liked his new shirt. They wanted the shirt.

Reid ran. He doesn’t remember much about what happened next. There was a car turning onto the street, followed by screeching tires and a sickening thud his mother heard as she tended to her younger children across the way. Reid went flying into the air, losing his shoes in the violence of the moment.

As he lay broken on the pavement, Ruth Ryan recalls her son, whose father was at work at Boston’s Fenway Park, asked a question she couldn’t honestly answer.

“Mom, am I going to die?”

She was sure her husband could hear her reaction a continent away.

At the hospital, the doctors had no trouble diagnosing Reid’s shattered left leg.

After the surgeons carved him open to check for internal injuries, they removed his severed spleen. When the pain lingered into the next week, they opened him up again and removed a damaged kidney they had hoped to save.

Then came the body cast.

It was sometime during his confining next two months in the hospital that Reid, described by his mother as previously “vivacious” but turned eerily “subdued,” took a silent oath.

“God blessed me with a second chance,” Reid Ryan says 34 years later. “That time shaped how I look at the world. I decided that no matter how many more years I had on this earth, I was going to be extremely positive in everything I do.”

In good hands

To watch Reid Ryan work the concourse at Minute Maid Park, home of his Astros, is akin to studying an evangelist working a revival. A little more than one month on the job, charged with rehabilitating a moribund franchise not shy about losing games and alienating fans, Reid acts like a one-man welcoming committee.

He enthusiastically works the crowd with boyish charm. Sitting with season-ticket holders here. Schmoozing on short concession lines there. Words are his fastball, his money pitch. His delivery is smooth. His magic is not from 60 feet, 6 inches, but at arm’s length — right or left.

Just as he did in leading the effort to build the Round Rock Express and Corpus Christi Hooks into model minor league franchises with robust fan bases, Ryan pounds the Minute Maid pavement with a pulp-free positive air.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if he was handing out his cellphone number to the fans,” said Jay Miller, an executive vice president with the Rangers charged with customer service in Arlington.

Miller, who worked alongside Ryan in Round Rock and Corpus, will not be surprised.

When he got around to asking Ryan in a recent telephone conversation if the Astros president, charged with rebuilding a business, was continuing the practice of sharing his personal phone number, Ryan told him he was only too happy to field the calls.

“When people call, I’ll know they care,” Ryan told his friend. “They know I care. That’s how you build an organization.”

The Astros, who drew 3 million paying fans as recently as 2007, attracted 1.6 million last season. They are averaging even fewer customers per game as they limp along this season. Consecutive 100-plus loss seasons haven’t helped. Neither did the organization’s less-than-fan-friendly ways. Owner Jim Crane, who purchased the team after the 2011 season, had done his best to cut ties with past glory. Familiar faces from secretaries to icons were ushered away from the franchise.

Don Sanders, a longtime friend of Reid’s father, Nolan, advised another friend, Crane, that Reid would be the perfect elixir for the Astros public relations problems. Sanders knew firsthand. He is a partner of the Ryans in Round Rock and Corpus Christi.

“Next year might have been too late,” said Sanders, who made his fortune in the investment business and once owned a piece of the Astros. “It would have been a total mess by then.

“I told Jim Crane that five years from now I was going to ask him if Reid Ryan was the best person he ever hired and I’d be surprised if he didn’t say, ‘Yes.’”

Change of plans

The Rangers drafted Reid Ryan out of TCU in the 17th round of the 1994 amateur draft.

At TCU, the right-handed pitcher honed his skills with the help of his father who plied his trade for the Rangers until 1993 in nearby Arlington. He also found his future wife, Nicole Perdue, on campus. She was a point guard on the Lady Frogs basketball team. Her father was on the faculty of TCU’s Brite Divinity School.

As much as the freshman basketball player didn’t want to get involved with the senior baseball player, Nicole was attracted to his “compassion, energy, faith and positive outlook.”

Reid was certain he was going to follow his father to the major leagues. But his fastball never measured up. Few ever have. Reid lasted two seasons in the Rangers minor league system before then general manager Doug Melvin told him he was through.

How much fun could it have been anyway?

“When you are Nolan Ryan’s son, if you had a great game that’s what people expected,” he said. “If I had a poor game, people said I would never be as good as the old man.”

Nolan Ryan advised his son to blaze his own trail, return to TCU to complete the requirements for a degree in radio, television and film. Reid was filling in for John Rhadigan one night on a Fox Sports Southwest Rangers telecast when, standing in the outfield between takes, he decided he would rather work in a front office.

When Reid told his father, Nolan immediately suggested his son call Sanders, who knew all about the business of money.

Reid wanted to start a minor league team in the Austin area. It wasn’t a novel concept. Others previously had tried three times and never passed the grade.

Sanders dispatched Reid to get the job done. The key was getting a hotel-motel sales tax passed to help fund a stadium.

“This time there was the credibility of the Ryan name,” said Charles Culpepper, then the mayor of Round Rock. “Reid was green. But he was tireless. He was as down to earth as could be. He was always out there shaking hands.”

Said Nolan: “We just supported him. He was the boots on the ground. He supplied the sweat.”

And some brains.

Culpepper said the clincher came when Reid organized a caravan of 10 charter buses to take the good citizens of Round Rock to San Antonio for a Double-A game featuring the Jackson (Miss.) Generals, the team Reid wanted to buy and move to Round Rock.

The Round Rock voters cheered mightily for the team from Mississippi and went home to later cast their ballots.

“The tax referendum for the stadium passed with 74 percent of the vote,” Culpepper said of the 1998 measure.

The city invested $9 million in the stadium project. Ryan-Sanders Baseball Inc. supplied the remaining $14 million for the state-of-the-art Dell Diamond, which opened in 2000. Ryan-Sanders bought the Generals for the then unheard of Double-A price of $5 million.

In 2005, the Double-A Express moved to brand new Whataburger Park in Corpus Christi and was rechristened the Hooks. Meanwhile, the Triple-A Express, formerly the Edmonton Eskimos, was born.

Minor League teams with designs on building new stadiums make pilgrimages to Round Rock before architectural renderings are approved.

“We designed stadiums for fans first and players second,” Reid Ryan said. “We bet on baseball. How could we lose?”

Positive outlook

The same year Reid Ryan, 28, shepherded the birth of the Express, Nicole gave birth to their son Jackson, whose brain was deprived of oxygen during birth.

“We were hoping he would make it a week,” Ruth Ryan said of her first grandson.

“Everyone was crying,” she said. “Reid took control. He said, ‘Don’t worry, all we have to do is love Jackson and God will take care of the rest.’”

“Reid said we should experience every day of Jackson’s life as a gift,” Nicole remembered. “Reid is a man of faith. He comes by it through experience.”

Although the doctors warned their son might never walk or talk, 13 years later Jackson plays baseball. He pitches with his left arm. Through years of surgeries, blood transfusions and physical therapy the motor skills on his damaged right side have developed enough to help him field with the aid of a Velcro device.

As for speaking, know that Jackson is a frequent guest in the radio booth of the Round Rock Express where he serves as a guest analyst.

“He knows as much about baseball as the rest of the Ryan men,” his mother said. “Maybe even more about some things.”

Reid Ryan said he hopes his son has learned the same lesson he took from his Hall of Fame father.

“He always told me don’t let the failure of your last pitch effect the next one,” Reid Ryan said. “There can’t be a more positive outlook on life than that.”

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